Poets
by ashesandhoney
Summary: A Herongraystairs OT3 Soulmate AU. The words on your skin are the first thing your soulmate will ever say to you and the first thing that you say to them is written on their bodies. It's a perfect system and Jem Carstairs - perfect student, perfect son, perfectly and carefully controlled Jem - doesn't fit into it the way he always thought he would.


James Carstairs had been thirteen the first time he'd heard the words on his skin spoken aloud but it hadn't been real and it hadn't quite counted. They had been at summer camp and one of his cabin mates had read them as he'd pulled himself up onto a dock. They were written across his hip, usually hidden away under clothing but his swim suit had slipped down far enough to show them.

"You aren't a poet are you?" he had said and Jem had turned to stare. Stupidly, he'd repeated the words back to him.

"You asshole, you don't read someone's words aloud," someone else had said. They said it in the same kind of voice they might have used if the boy with the blue eyes had run naked through a wedding or dropped a baby out a window. There were things that weren't done and Jem understood why. His stomach had turned sideways and the world had dropped out around him. Just like in the stories but it hadn't been real.

"Are you sure you aren't my soulmate, Duck?" Jem had said because it was easier to make it a joke. It was one of those camps where everyone had a nickname. Jem had been there since school had ended. He was there every summer as soon as school ended and he was used to being Jem now. The nickname felt more natural than James did. Duck was a newbie. He'd arrived that morning and though someone had told him the boy's name, Jem hadn't spoken to him yet. The old guard didn't talk to the freshies until they'd made it to their first campfire on the third day. There were rules.

Duck lay sprawled out on the dock, his skinny pale chest rising and falling and his eyes shut. His hair was starting to dry into a tangle of curls. He was already sunburning across his nose and shoulders. He was one of the short term kids who showed up for two weeks and then vanished again. Jem usually stuck with the old guard, the ones who were there every week from June until September. He had diplomat parents who couldn't haul a 13 year old all over the world with them so he spent winters at boarding schools and summers at camp. When his parents were in town they pulled him out of whichever one he was at and they spent as much time as possible playing hooky before he went back to being a long distance child.

Duck ignored him and just kept cultivating his sunburn. Later though, he cornered Jem in the dining hall. He was a little taller and already handsome. One of those boys that little old ladies would pat on the head and call 'future heartbreaker' or something like that. Black curls, blue eyes, pale under the sunburn. He had a smile that made people pay attention.

"Sorry," he said.

"I don't mind," Jem had tried to shrug it off.

"Mine are the same. I hadn't ever thought I'd find someone who has the same words. I didn't mean to be weird about it," he said and he undid his watch to show him the words on his wrist. They were exactly the same. No punctuation, words never had punctuation, just words. You aren't a poet are you. Jem stared at them. Reached out and touched them and then let himself smile.

They had spent the next week and a half together. The soulmate jokes followed them everywhere but it didn't really matter. They leaned together over meals. They abandoned Jem's old guard friends to run through the trails or steal kayaks while everyone else was off making pottery. It was a little like having a soulmate might have been. Someone he just fit with.

Duck memorized poetry because he had been fascinated by his words since he was old enough to read them for himself. Jem had never really considered the words as part of a conversation, just as a way to announce her when he finally met her. Duck thought of the ways that they would fit into conversations what he would say that would make them say that and what he would say back if he ever heard the words.

"So you're going to quote love poetry at every girl you meet until one of them responds by mocking you?" Jem asked.

"Essentially. Maybe not love poetry maybe 'Pulvis et umbra sumus' or 'this is how the world ends not with a bang but a whimper' just because I'd like to find someone more interesting than a girl who like simpering love poems," he said.

Then, two days before the end of camp, two days before everyone went back to school, the Carstairs showed up in a car with diplomatic plates and pulled Jem out of breakfast. Caught up in the whirlwind of packing up his bunk and his mother's stories about Beijing and his father's jokes, he didn't even get to say goodbye. And because they hadn't made it to the ridiculous un-naming ceremony at the last camp fire, he had never learned what Duck's real name was.

For years, he wondered if maybe he'd been wrong and maybe it wasn't less real because Duck had read the words rather than said them. Hadn't he said them back? They'd done exactly as they were supposed to and then gone on assuming it wasn't real. Each time Jem, and he still used that name long after camp, found himself with a crush on a boy, he thought of blue eyes and black hair and poets. Maybe his story would be one of those tragic ones. One of those sad stories of having missed the connection when they were too young to recognize it.

* * *

He was sitting in a campus cafe grading papers for the class he was a teaching asistant for when a group of girls sat down across the long table from him. Three of them talking over and into each other in that way that only close friends had, in that way that Jem didn't really have with anyone. He was in his first year of grad school and it was a new city and he was friendless again but he was used to that. He would meet someone.

The brunette wearing the white wool sweater leaned across the table to shift his book and read the spine. It was for an English lit class. He was a linguistics major with aims at working in translation but this was the TA position that had come through. He struggled with it but it was a first year class and he was finding that he wasn't terrible at teaching even if he was terrible at poetry.

"Don't pull other people into this, Tess," one of her friends said.

"You aren't a poet are you?" she asked.

And the world dropped out around him like it had ten years ago when he'd been just a little boy at a summer camp. He pulled himself back together but couldn't think of an answer that made sense. All that would come was the boy on the dock and that night they'd climbed up onto the roof of the dining hall and Duck had quoted poetry at him. So that was what came out.

"Pulvis et umbra sumus," he said.

She laughed, not like the world had dropped out around her as well but like it was funny. Like he had told an unusual joke. She studied him for a moment and then said, "Classics?"

"Linguistics actually, I'm TA for a first year lit course," he said.

"Ah, that's close enough, explain to her that Romantic with a capital R is not the same thing as romantic," she said.

"Romanticism was a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual," Jem pulled out of memory.

"See, spooky moors are Romantic even if they aren't romantic," she said and then she pulled back from him and dropped herself back into the flow of the conversation with her friends.

As though nothing had happened.

And Jem's heart felt like it was made out of glass. He tried to look back at his papers but the words had lost their meaning. She was right there. She was beautiful, a little younger than he was, probably an upper year undergrad. Gray eyes, brown hair, a fleeting smile that broke though her otherwise serious expressions. A bag of books, a cup of tea. A necklace on a long chain though the pendant was inside her shirt where he couldn't see it. He grabbed details as he glanced up but didn't let himself stare. She couldn't be more than twenty one but after a little bit of real staring at her hands wrapped around the china mug he couldn't doubt that was what it was. A gold band and a ring with an sapphire set in it.

A wedding ring.

His glass heart did shatter. Because that's why she hadn't said anything. She hadn't waited to meet him. She had made a choice and chosen someone else before they'd ever had a chance to be in the same room. One of the friends left and when the other went to bathroom, he leaned across the table. He had almost composed himself by then.

"I respect your decision. I won't bother you. I just wanted to know your name," he said.

She looked up at him. Looked at him directly like she had only just noticed what she had said, what he had said, what it meant. Her eyes were wide and confused. A corner of his imagination was churning, running away without him, imagining the way this would become their story. They would tell people about how she was the only person in the world who didn't recognize her words when she heard them. Except that wasn't the story that they were ever going to tell because there wasn't no such thing as "they". He hadn't realized how much of his lonely childhood had been spent waiting for her until he found himself staring at her.

"You said," she started and then her voice faltered.

"Pulvis et umbra sumus," he said with a smile, "It means-"

She cut him off, "We are dust and shadows, I know."

"It doesn't have to go any farther than that," he looked down pointedly at her hand. She held it up and looked at the ring like it was something foreign. She was still at a loss for words and for the first time in his life, Jem ran away. He gave her what he hoped was a kind smile, not a sad one, and then he gathered up his piles without any thought to his careful organization and he walked away. He threw himself into the crowd in the student center so she wouldn't be able to follow him even if she wanted to.

* * *

He didn't see her for the rest of the week but he thought about her. He thought about her during his classes, when he sat alone in his little flat, during his time in the practice rooms with his violin. Especially when he had the instrument in his hands. It was almost as though the violin had more to say about her than he could put into words. He didn't have words. Just oceans of confusion and strings of music notes.

Any time he was alone, she was there in his thoughts. His office hours were going to be hellish. He was required to keep office hours during which the two discussion groups he ran could come and speak to him one on one about their concerns. They were held in a little closet masquerading as an office in the English department shared by approximately half the other teaching assistants in the department. The other half had the closet across the hall. Jem had 1 hour a week in which he sat in the room, almost always alone unless there was a paper due, and read.

She showed up towards the end of his hour. A tentative knock and then she was peaking through the partially open door. Her hair was braided today, falling like a rope over the shoulder of her cream coloured jacket. She was wrapped in a gray scarf which made her eyes look blue. His memory hadn't been able to settle on what colour they actually were though his imagination had called up the other details of her face over and over.

He blinked and looked down at his papers again for a moment before looking back at her with a smile. He was going to be polite and normal. He could be polite and normal. He tried for a joke, "Do you need help with the reading response journal?"

"I think I'll figure it out," she said stepping into the room. She wore a pair of jeans and black boots that cut off at mid calf. Jem had never cared about fashion. He wore what other people wore so he didn't stand out. He chose neutral colours and kept his collection of unusual t-shirts and brightly colour shoes off campus and away from his family. He usually didn't notice anyone else but he noticed her.

"How did you find me?" he asked.

"I'm a detective," she said with a half smile. He raised his eyebrows at her and the smile spread. He tried to tell himself maybe they could be friends and he could keep her at the edges of his life without it being what his parents had. He was going to have to train his heart to keep beating when she smiled if that was going to work. He wasn't sure he trusted himself to be capable of learning that.

She continued, "I went to the bookstore and went through the shelves of course materials until I found the book you'd had that day and then found out when the office hours for EN 1020 were by calling the very unpleasant receptionist out front. I had to apologize twice yesterday and pretend I was looking for my own TA. 1020 is a big course to have five teaching assistants."

"That's the only reason they hired me. I don't do literature," he said.

"And yet you quote Horace on command?" she asked.

He laughed and leaned forward. She watched him like he'd done something far more interesting. He had a moment of self consciousness. What was his hair doing? Did he have lunch on his shirt? Did he look as much like a scarecrow as his grandmother claimed while chiding him to eat more? Maybe it was better that she wasn't available, she wasn't in his league in the slightest.

"I had a friend, a long time ago, who said you needed to plan what you would say when you heard your words and mine were about poets so he tried to teach me poetry," he said, "I froze up when you said that. That conversation from when I was 12 was all I could remember."

"You aren't a poet, are you?" she said again.

"Yours are that quote," he said unable to repeat the exchange verbatim, "Dust and shadows."

"I looked the words up with my aunt when I was little. I was fascinated to have another language. I didn't know what to make of them being a long dead language. I went through a stage where I tried to learn Latin because I thought I might need it to talk to my match when I met them. Some people spend their lives waiting to hear a coffee order or an apology for something mundane like stepping on their toes. I got poetry in another language. I was proud of it," she said.

"You didn't wait," he said and it came out neutral for which he was impossibly grateful. She met his eyes again but didn't answer him immediately. She looked towards the understocked bookshelf and started to talk as though talking to herself.

"It was the first day of high school, no, second day but it was the first day I went into the cafeteria. There was this obnoxious boy, a year ahead of me, running off Shakespeare quotes and bits of famous love poems. He was showing off. It was the type of school where reciting Shakespeare was something you could show off. Arts schools are weird places. I'm not artistic but my brother was studying acting so I applied to the same school because my aunt wanted us to go to the same place. I technically majored in voice, that is, singing. This guy, he was making a show of it," she said.

Jem knew where this story ended before she said it but she told him the entire story, "He sat down across from my brother and I. Nate was muttering about how much he hated this guy and I didn't want Nate mad at me so I said with my very best fourteen year old sarcasm, 'You aren't a poet, are you?' and he stopped. The whole show ground to a complete and utter halt and all his pretensions slipped and he was just looking at me. I told him that he should write something new instead of just quoting old masters and he ignored me and said those words. I gave him back the translation and he grinned," she smiled at the memory, fond and happy just thinking about it.

"We were the running joke. We were that couple, every school has that couple. My brother despised him, still does. My aunt thought I rushed everything. We got married as soon as I was 18. He went away to university the year before me but I moved down to the city as soon as high school finished. I have never doubted it. Never," she said.

"I've never heard of someone having the same combination twice," Jem said.

"Me neither," she said.

Maybe he had someone else out there. Maybe this was a false start. The idea should have been comforting but with her sitting there, he didn't want that. She was still a stranger but each crack of smile, each new detail he picked up, made him want her. He wanted her undivided attention. He had wanted a soulmate as long as he'd been able to understand it but it had been abstract.

This wasn't abstract.

He didn't want someone.

He wanted her.

"My name is Tessa, you asked for my name before you ran off," she said.

"I'm James but my friends call me Jem," he said and it wasn't quite a lie. He didn't have many friends but most of the ones who mattered called him Jem. It was Duck, that friend he'd had for only a week and half a decade before that came to mind as he said that. Duck had never called him anything else. Never James like the kids from his church group or Carstairs like the boys at the private school he'd gone to. Just Jem and so in the years since he'd introduced himself as Jem with every person he thought might matter. A secret message they would never understand. One that said, this is who I really am.

She was studying him again and the wanting came back. For so long the idea had been good enough, the thought someday he would find his own person, that this new specificity kept hitting him like a punch. Not a person. This person. Her. Tessa. Her eyes were serious, her expression curious and considering. Her hands were folded in her lap below the edge of the desk, he couldn't see them but he wanted to reach out and hold one.

"Your words are on your hip," she said.

He frowned at her and there was a knock at the door before his alarm and his confusion could become words. How did she know that? He didn't have time to ask. She was getting up, answering the door for him while he reassembled his thoughts.

It was one of his students. A real student with the book in her hand and a polite expectant 'about to talk to a teacher' look on her face. Tessa stepped out of the way so she could step into the office. The girl was making apologies and Jem couldn't remember her name though she was the keener in his Thursday discussion group who had an answer for everything and he had called her by name a hundred times since the semester had started.

"I'll meet you back there, at five?" Tessa said and Jem nodded at her and she slipped out of the room. He barely made it through the appointment. He barely made it through the hour between the end of his office hours and five o'clock. After a half hour of pacing through the campus buildings he gave up trying to kill time. He went back to the cafe where they had first met, too early but not caring and waited.

She arrived just a little bit earlier than five and he knew who was with her before he sat down. It surprised him that it had taken him so long to put that piece together. Her match had his words. He'd already met someone else with his words and what were the chances it was someone else? Someone else who was dramatic and poetry obsessed and had eyes someone might describe as incredible. And she knew where his words were. Outside his family the list of people who knew that - and might tell her - was impossibly short.

"You know, Jem, for the record, isn't a very creative nickname for someone names James. It's like going by Jimmy," was the first thing he said. He wasn't skinny anymore and he had gotten very tall. He dropped into the chair across from Jem and gave him one of those silly radiant smiles he had. The little boy he had been was still there. His eyes were immediately familiar and he still hadn't learned to brush his hair properly. It was too long but he had grown up handsome and made it work.

"Duck on the other hand, is hilarious and witty," Jem said.

"Ducks are bloodthirsty little monsters, Duck is a name for a warrior," he said.

"Your nickname at camp was Duck? Can I call you Duckie?" Tessa scoffed. Her husband narrowed his eyes in mock contempt and ignored the comment. In spite of himself, in spite of the way the little shards of glass in his heart were rubbing over each other at seeing them together, Jem smiled at them. There was a silliness in Tessa that hadn't been there the last time they talked.

That undefinable something that followed his parents around like a haze was there as well. They were two people against the world. Brighter and truer versions of themselves just for being near each other. If a part of him had been whispering that maybe this wasn't a true match, it fell silent from just that one look.

"And your real name is?" Jem said.

"Oh he's forfeit his real name with this bit of information, he's Duckie for the rest of this life," Tessa said leaning against his shoulder and poking him in the chest.

"Will," he said shoving her off while she giggled, "William Owen Herondale. Don't start a war, Tess, I will come up with worse things to call you than Duckie."

She snickered again and then asked Jem what he wanted to drink adding, "Duckie's buying."

"I will divorce you and get myself one of those really expensive lawyers so that you are left penniless and destitute," Will declared.

"You say that like you could survive for ten minutes without me," she shot back.

There was a little flurry of activity as drinks were bought. While Tessa stood in line, Will pulled Jem into a hug. He tensed for a split second before he returned it. People didn't hug Jem. He kept his boundaries up too high for most people to attempt it. He hadn't grown up in a loveless home by any stretch of the imagination but his mother had been promoted and sent on her first diplomatic mission to China when he was nine and from that point forward affection was limited to family visits which were few and far between in a world of boarding schools and summer camp.

"I had been sure for a long time that it was you," Will said into his ear.

"Me too," Jem said.

"People told me that since I had read it, it didn't count but you said mine back, even if you were just repeating what I had said," Will still hadn't let go of the hug, "And then you were gone. Just gone. There at breakfast and then gone. Nobody at that camp knew anything about you, vague things about moving to China and how your dad was the president of some country in Europe."

Will finally let him go and Jem was explaining what his mother did and where. They weren't world leaders but they were impressive enough to make Will raise his eyebrows at the story. When Tessa came back and put the tray of drinks down, Will gave a far more dramatic recap.

She gave Will a look that Jem couldn't read. It reminded him that they had something he wasn't a part of. They did not talk about it. There was no mention of words, no theories or questions or demands for explanations.

They drank coffee and talked about everything else.

Anything else.

The conversation wound through the mundane topics. Families and majors and jobs. It touched on music and books and Will recited the entire to be or not to be soliloquy from Hamlet at hyper speed in a muppet voice while Tessa laughed until she had to make him stop because she couldn't breathe. Jem swung wildly between that perfectly comfortable feeling of a room full of old friends and something painful that tottered between sorrow and jealousy.

And then it was getting late and life was calling. Jem had a paper to finish and Tessa and Will lived off campus somewhere and the cafe was going to close and kick them out. Still, they lingered until they couldn't anymore. Will gave him another hug and Tessa gave him a phone number and promises for a next time were made.

No one mentioned words. No one mentioned matches. After not nearly long enough, they left and Jem went home alone.

* * *

He finished his paper without actually thinking about it. He looked at the grade reports he needed to enter into the system for his students but when he opened the web browser, that wasn't what he pulled up. Instead he went searching for any evidence that other people had mismatched or double matched words.

He dug up the old urban legends that everyone knew of serial killers who got tattoos they used to trick unsuspecting girls into trusting them. He found a long article on the linguistic traditions of the words and the debate about whether the font and language matched the speaker or the receiver. That he emailed to himself to read later then kept digging. He found an unsettling series of posts on a forum on how to manipulate your date using your words and theirs. A cult that required all new members have their words removed and replaced with the leader's.

Pages and pages of theories and discussions about what the world would be like without words. Questions of how people would find love if they never had that proof. How did you love someone when you might still find your perfect match?

There was painfully little to find about shared words. There were people who had the same words, what he and Will had wasn't common but it also wasn't unheard of.

Once, the service industry had refused to hire unmatched staff because it was seen as obscene to force someone to meet so many strangers and always say the same thing. These days though, words like, "How may I help you?" were common enough to be considered a problem by politicians and concerned parents' groups and every disappointed person who found them on their skin. Usually the distinction was in the match. One person's words might be generic but the other's were specific.

A case like Tessa, where her words were so unusual to have had the same thing said to her twice in her entire life was so unlikely as to be impossible. And to have the same exchange, the same two phrases traded back and forth, well that defied coincidence. But Jem couldn't make it make sense. It wasn't a coincidence but it didn't matter because her choices were already made.

He gave up the search without finding what he wanted. His phone chirped as he went to lie down and go to bed. He picked it up, expecting some spam message about extending his plan and instead it was an unfamiliar number. He clicked it open and sat and stared at it for a long time before he responded.

It was a selfie. Will holding up a kitchen knife while Tessa stood in the background with a rubber duck in her hand. She was laughing hard enough that she was leaning against a counter top to keep from falling over. Her hair fell around her. Will was attempting to glare but his lips were quirked into a smile. The message that came along with it read, your fault

murder is wrong, duckie he sent back.

one of us isn't going to survive came the response followed quickly by, don't you start too.

that duck looks dangerous he sent.

It was a conversation in absurdity punctuated by stupid pictures that ended with Will stabbing the bath toy with the kitchen knife and Tessa burying it in a potted plant. Jem couldn't find words for lying in his bed with this window into their life open in his palm. After they'd gone, signed off and gone off to bed, he went and paged back through the images. He shut off the part of his brain that told him he was being a stalker for noticing that Tessa wasn't wearing socks and that their entire living room was lined in bookshelves or they left sweaters thrown over chairs and tea cups sitting beside tottering piles of books.

He went to sleep with his phone in his hand as though letting go of it would mean losing something.

* * *

It was Will who showed up the next time. He appeared where he wasn't expected, helping himself to a seat in Jem's 1020 lecture and grinning without saying anything. They sat together until break when one of Jem's students decided he had a pressing question that took up the entire ten minutes and then they sat together through to the end. Jem grabbed his sleeve and yanked him out of the classroom before someone could find something else to stop him with.

"Do you often audit freshman classes?" Jem asked.

"Haven't done it since Tessa was in one," Will said in a voice that carried too much weight. He said it like he wanted to say all the things they hadn't been talking about.

"You two really are the romantic ideal aren't you?" Jem said.

"Took us awhile to get there," Will said with a shrug.

"She made it sound like you had been together since the first week of high school," Jem said.

"Not quite," Will said.

Jem was walking in the direction of his next class, not one he TA'd for but one that he actually needed to attend to graduate. He stopped at the corner. He needed to turn left and head down to the seminar rooms in the Branwell Building but to the right, were the fine art buildings. He looked at Will and Will just waited, the conversation paused until Jem said something or started moving again.

"Are we talking about this?" he asked.

"I'd like to," Will said.

"Okay," he said.

He went right. Will followed along behind him. He stepped into the music building. Punched in the code from memory and went up to the practice hall. He wasn't on the schedule but there were going to be empty rooms on a Tuesday afternoon. He didn't get his violin, he just scribbled his name down on an hour long time slot and took Will up to the little room with the sound proof walls. In the hall you could hear the distant drone of strings and brass but inside the room was eerie silent.

"If I start screaming will anyone hear me?" he asked.

"If they were right outside," Jem said with a shrug. He dropped down into one of the chairs and hung his bag off the back of it. Will sat down on the bench beside the keyboard and pressed some keys with long graceful fingers. It was off. The flat little thunk of them made Jem smile. He reached over and clicked it on and Will tried again. This time he pulled out notes but not a tune.

"You play?" Will asked.

"Violin, not piano," he said, "But if that was any indication, I am better on piano than you are."

"That's not hard. An angry monkey would be better on the piano than I am," Will said.

"You were telling me how you somehow managed not to fall immediately in love with Tessa?" Jem said and Will looked at him in a way that said he understood what Jem was trying to gloss over. That Jem had fallen immediately. Jem pretended he didn't have a blush climbing his neck and raised his eyebrows.

"It was you," Will said.

"What?" Jem said.

"You were my match. I doubted it a little at first but that night we climbed up onto the roof and you leaned your head into my shoulder while laughing at my poetry, I knew. I never doubted it until her. I had never even had a crush on a girl until she pushed her way into my life with big gray eyes and a sense of humour like a razor blade. It took me a long time to let go of you. I had spent the year after camp making plans to come and find you. I had all these fantasies of going back to camp and you'd be there with your tan and all your friends and you'd leave them all behind to hug me and tell me that you missed me," he said.

"You didn't come back that summer. I tried to get the camp office to tell me your name but they wouldn't. Privacy reasons, apparently," Jem said remembering the moment at every new session's first camp fire when he'd scan all the new arrivals getting ready to step up for their name and their clan and how each week the disappointment got heavier until the last session when he reached the end of the row and actually walked away from the group to go sit on the dock in the dark and pretend he wasn't heartbroken.

"We moved. I threw a fit but I was twelve and a half and my fit wasn't going to change my father's job. I tried to tell myself that I would find you again. Tried to come up with schemes that might work," Will said.

"And then you found her," Jem said.

"And she was everything I hadn't known I wanted," Will said with that fond smile. "I didn't tell her about you until a year in. I told her the whole story expecting jealousy or dismissal. I was used the story about you being dismissed. Just a childhood joke, a silly crush. That's what my mother had done when I told her about Tessa. She'd told me that this was proof it wasn't you and now I could forget about you. I took it as an offense. Forget. I couldn't forget. But Tess listened to every word. She wanted to hear all my stories about you. I think that's when I could accept, entirely and completely believe that she was my match. I never really let go of you. I love her but I always held onto those memories. And now here you are again."

"My apologies for complicating your life," Jem said. "I seem to be some sort of glitch in the system and it just happens to be your life I'm disrupting."

"There is no way in hell that you are a glitch," Will said.

"I can't be your match and her match," Jem said.

"Why not?" Will asked.

"That's not how it works," Jem said.

"That's exactly how it works. You say their words and they say yours. That is exactly what happened here. It just happened twice. That isn't a coincidence, James. Life doesn't work like that, the words don't work like that. It means something," Will said.

"And what does it mean?" Jem asked.

"That you should come to ours for dinner," Will said.

"No," Jem said.

"No? What the hell do you mean no?" Will said.

He didn't mean for the full truth to come out but for so long Will had existed in the back of his mind as the person he could tell anything to. The little voice in his head that was half conscience and half impulse always looked like Will when he imagined it. And so honesty was what came out.

"That would be a bad idea right now. I need time to think all this through. I can't be in the same room as her right now. I could barely keep from touching her hair in the cafe and she was a stranger. God Will. Do you know how many times I've gone through those pictures you sent me of the great duckie massacre? It's only been a few days and I have scrolled through them a hundred times. I want to know if her hair is actually as soft as it looks. It probably gets everywhere. I want to wake up with it in my face and her curled up beside him. I can't go to dinner with thoughts like that in my head," he shook his head like he could knock the thoughts loose.

"And then there's you. You sitting there like you wouldn't mind if I did crawl into your lap and start unbuttoning your shirt. I talked myself out of you when I was thirteen and yet you're right there and your eyes are bluer than I remember them and you keep smiling. I should probably go," Jem said before he could say anything else about Will's smile.

It was a torrent of words. It poured out without his stopping to think. Once it was over he closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together as though so much as breathing was going to start it all over again. And he'd be talking about Tessa's feet and the way her eyes scrunched up when she was laughing or how he had almost crawled into bed beside Will almost every night at camp but stopped himself because there were too many other people in the cabin.

He opened his eyes to find Will too close. He had crossed the room and was leaning down in front of Jem. Jem's heart took off. It beat like it was trying to escape his rib cage and take flight. He swallowed and held his gaze. Incredible eyes indeed. William Herondale was disturbingly beautiful. Almost too pretty. His jaw line and something about the set of his cheekbones kept his face firmly masculine and Jem's hand started to drift up and he pressed it back to his thigh before he had the feel of Will's pulse beating against his palm adding fuel to fantasies he couldn't have.

"I have thought about you almost daily for ten years. Tessa went and hunted you down just to see your face again. What are you scared of?" Will asked in a low soft voice. That he had that kind of gentleness in him made Jem flinch. It was easier to imagine that he was a little bit of an asshole. People that pretty were usually assholes but he couldn't write Will off like that.

"You two love each other so much, I've seen you together once and even I can see it, I don't belong in that. Is there anything worse than interfering in someone else's match? I'm going to end up with my heart broken," he said in a voice as low as Will's. His wasn't gentle. His was angry and sad and muddled.

"It's already broken," Will said, "I can see it every time you mention Tess. You haven't said her name once."

"And dinner will make that better? The two of you can't possibly want me around, childhood crush notwithstanding," Jem asked.

Will sat back, he dragged the piano bench over and sat down on the edge of it and dug his phone out of his pocket. He needed to arch his back and twist his hip a little to do it and though it was a thing everyone did and Jem had seen a hundred times on a hundred people, his heart made another escape attempt to see it. Will leaned forward so his elbows rested on his knees. He dialed and put it on speaker.

"Hey love," she said and that American accent came through the phone and made Jem's face change. Will saw it happen but looked back down at the screen and pretended he hadn't.

"Hi. I hope that lecture wasn't too bad," he said.

"No worse than usual. I hope you actually did some laundry on your day off," she said.

"No, but I'll put a load in tonight, I swear. I called because I want to invite Jem to dinner," Will said.

"I meant it yesterday, I want to see him. It's weird, I know it's weird but it isn't a bad weird, is it?" her voice went up with the question and Jem could imagine her looking worried as she said it.

"I don't think so," Will said and then glanced up at Jem, "He does."

"If he told you to fuck off Will, listen to him, we're probably ruining his life. Between the two of us we've managed to ruin finding his soulmate twice. Maybe we should just leave him alone," she said.

Jem found himself shaking his head. That was not what he wanted. That was not the slightest what he wanted. He didn't know what he wanted. He knew all the pieces of what he wanted but not how they fit together. He wanted to be there for the next duckie murder or whatever absurdity they came up with. He wanted Tessa's hair in his fingers. He wanted Will to hug him so that he could feel him breathing when he spoke. He wanted to fit himself into the quiet places while they flung words back and forth.

"The words 'fuck off' have not been used. Until they are, I'm going to continue to attempt to bring him home," he said.

"He's not a stray cat," she laughed, "But bring food with you. I have at least 3 hours of reading to do so I am neither cooking nor eating anything you make."

"Your wish is my command," he said and then disconnected the phone and looked up at Jem. He was still leaning forward over his knees. It was a casual position but Jem's attention kept snagging on the way his fingers hung and the way his hair fell into his eyes. He'd thought falling for Tessa was a disaster but falling for Will was going to be worse. That he'd known them only a few days and was already this deep was not making it any easier.

"The point of that?" he asked.

"To prove that she wants you to come too," Will said.

Jem pushed himself up and away. Away from blue eyes and hair that fell in a twisted gorgeous tangle. Since when had he been so interested in hair and other people's hands?

There were debates on whether it was innate or just a trick of perception but nearly everyone said it was true. The attraction always hit hard. Even among people who didn't have the same intensely physical wanting that was running through Jem, that fascination, that desire to be around your match was said to be universal. He hadn't expected it to be quite this strong. He stopped by the door and crossed his arms like he needed a defense. Will didn't follow him but he watched.

"I don't want to be your friend," Jem said tightening his arms and closing his eyes. If he didn't think about it, didn't examine it too closely, maybe it wouldn't hurt as much to say it.

Will was silent and Jem wasn't sure he could say the next part. He didn't turn around. He opened his eyes to look at the plain door with the fire safety card on it. He read the instructions about how to escape in case of emergency. The little diagram showing where the stairs were did not have the answers he needed. He shut his eyes again.

"I think it may be better if I just walk away. I want things that aren't possible and it's going to hurt more the closer I get. But thank you. For the invitation," Jem said.

He turned around to pick up his bag and found Will standing. His eyebrows drawn together and his mouth half open like he wanted to say something but couldn't find the words for it. Jem reached out and put his hand on Will's shoulder. It wasn't really an accident that his hand fell high enough to touch the skin right above Will's collar. Will was the one who had gotten closer, or maybe it was him, they were closer. The moment caught and held. A bubble in an updraft. Another instant and it would fall back to earth and spill them out onto the dirty ground again.

"Thank you," Jem said again. He wasn't sure what he was offering thanks for. For the invitation to dinner or for trying to make it better or simply for existing.

"I don't want you to disappear again," Will said.

"Go home and be happy," Jem said.

"Come with me and we will be," Will said.

"That's not how the world works," Jem said.

"Yes it is," Will insisted stepping into Jem's personal space. His body reacted differently than it had in the cafe, the last time Will had been close. That had been friendly and comforting but he had been able to breath through it. This time, his stomach twisted hard and the skin down his back prickled. Will didn't touch him. Jem's palm was the only point of contact and even that was electric. He sucked in a breath because he had forgotten that his body needed air. Will's pulse hammered under his hand.

"You are married, the two of you have already made that choice and I have seen enough already to know that it is the right choice. I am not a part of it and that's nothing you need to feel guilty about. You don't owe me some spot in your life because I'm the place where the perfect soulmate system failed. It has to fail sometimes, nature always does. I am the mistake and that's not your concern," Jem said.

"It's nothing I owe you," Will's voice was angry and Jem risked looking up at his eyes instead of down at his shirt front. His expression matched the voice. Hostile and intense. Jem might have recoiled but Will reached up and grabbed his neck. His hand was in the same place Jem's was but he gripped tight, holding him close.

"Will," he started.

"I have missed you for ten years. You can't fall back into my life and then disappear again. Tessa is half in love with you and she's met you once. I understand it. That's all it took for me too," he trailed off and Jem took another stuttering breath of air that smelled too much like Will to calm him down.

"She's been worried and protective, like you're already hers to take care of. She does that sometimes to me too or her friends. She hasn't sent you a single message but she's written hundreds. Written them out and then edited and edited and edited before deleting them entirely and trying again. I don't want you to come home with me as some consolation prize for mucking up your words. I want you to come home with me because I want you to be there and so does she," Will said.

Jem was caught. Trapped. Not by the hand on his neck but by the look in Will's eyes and how much he wanted what was being offered.

"If you don't want to that's different but I refuse to take some bullshit about how the world works as a valid excuse. There are only three people who get to care about this," Will said.

"Ok," Jem said. Any argument he might have had fallen apart. He wanted this. Will pulled him into a hug and the tension shattered. It had been the start of something big but the wave broke. The hug was a relief. Like coming back down gently. Nothing resolved but nothing ruined.

* * *

They got pizza, they took it back to the Herondales' apartment. Jem fell in love with the place almost as fast as he had fallen in love with the people. It was piled with books and soft fabrics and ikea furniture that they only sometimes managed to assemble properly. The way they laughed together seemed to have seeped into the floor boards of the place. Jem wanted to spend his life wrapped in it.

The conversation about words and wants fell away again. They played pretend. They weren't anything special. Just friends. They ate pizza and then rather than going home to study, Jem curled up with his notes on the sofa and did his homework there. It took more self control than he had known he had to keep from getting distracted. Tessa sat on the same piece of furniture, not touching, never touching, and did her own reading.

And that became the new normal.

For the next few weeks, he spent more evenings there than he did at home. He did his homework and his grading, he argued movies with Will and got caught up in Tessa's bizarre spinning humour. He taught them how to make his mother's dumpling recipe and they only burned half of them. One night he helped Tessa make a lasagna from scratch and ended up with tomato sauce burns up both his arms. It was also the first time he touched her. She leaned across him, her shoulder brushing his chest to grab the bag of onions.

They both froze and retreated but they also didn't explode. After that touching got easier. She started, by degrees, to touch him like Will did. A hand on his arm. A knee against his. Leaning in to grab something on the other side of him. It was almost accidental.

Almost.

About a week after the lasagna they were gathered in the kitchen again. They'd been skipping through radio stations when the classical station started a waltz and Tessa tried to cajole Will into a dance. She stood there, in her bare feet, with a half a glass of wine in hand and glared. He refused until she finally turned to Jem.

"I made him take a ballroom dance class before the wedding," Tessa said, "Don't believe him when he tells you he can't dance."

"I can't dance," Will repeated from where he sat on the counter swinging his feet like a little boy. He wore a plain long sleeved shirt pushed up to his elbows and was bracing his hands on either side of his legs. There were things Jem had never considered attractive before William Herondale and forearms were one of them.

"I can guarantee that you are better than me," Jem said. Fancy ballroom dance classes were the type of thing that happened at a school like the one Jem had attended but he had never gone to one.

His refusals led to a dancing lesson. Almost accidental touching was very different from waltzing. A few failed attempts at footwork were all it took before she gave up and just put her head on his shoulder and swayed. Like a middle school dance where no one moved their feet and everyone was afraid of where their hands were. Jem held one of her hands and the other was on her waist. She was close and warm and smelled like home. He looked up at Will over her head with a look on his face that was somewhere between panicked and helpless. Will was watching them with soft edged curiosity on his face. Like they were adorable.

For a month they folded him into their lives like that. No one talked too much about it. They just shuffled around until he fit. He fell asleep on their couch and woke up with his head on Will's knee while they talked about something they were reading over his head. He stayed over in their mess of a spare room and in morning Will lent him clothes that hung off him all wrong but smelled too good to be worth arguing about.

There were conversations they weren't having but it didn't stop the lines from getting blurrier. Out on the little balcony at Jem's, one of the few times he'd had them over, Tessa had said something that made Will laugh. He'd responded by leaning in and kissing her. She had reached up and looped her arms around his neck as he leaned her back against the railing. Jem should have turned away, given them some space but instead he had just stared. Tessa had glanced up at him first and he'd finally looked away after flushing scarlet.

"Sorry," she said.

"No, don't be, I had kind of suspected that you two were into kissing," he said trying to make it a joke though it fell flat. Tessa had held out a hand to him and he'd taken it. Helplessly. As helpless as if refusing her was a physical impossibility. Will still had her pushed back against the bit of metal that kept them from a four story drop. He'd pulled back from the kiss to watch Jem.

"You now you can ask us for anything," she said.

"Including to watch, you can always ask to watch," Will suggested and Tessa shot him a look.

Jem tightened his fingers on Tessa's. Touching her was rare enough for even just her hand in his to be a bit of a thrill. He leaned in, lacing his fingers with hers and setting his shoulder against Will's while they both watched him. Their combined gazes had weight but he pretended he couldn't feel it. He wasn't sure he was ready for this but this wasn't an invitation that had come up before. He wasn't prepared to waste it.

"Do you still want me to watch?" he asked.

Will glanced at Tessa and the near smile she gave him must have meant more to him than it did to Jem because he leaned in and kissed her again. Her fingers tightened in Jem's and he stroked the back of her hand with his thumb but otherwise kept his hands to himself. He wanted to get closer. He wanted to touch Tessa's hair and slide his hand up her neck when Will's moved down her shoulders and traced down to her waist. He wanted to trace Will's jaw but he held himself to just watching it happen.

Will hooked his fingers into her belt loops to pull her closer but he didn't resettle his hands around her waist. One disappeared into her hair, cradling the back of her neck and tilting her face up, the other slid around Jem's waist. Jem's promise to himself that he wasn't going to cross any more lines fell apart. He slid his arm around Will's shoulder and pressed in so his body touched both of theirs. He wasn't a part of the kiss, but he was unavoidably a part of the moment.

Things might have shifted permanently that night if Tessa's phone hadn't rang and distracted them all. It took Jem so much by surprise that he actually jumped. He had leaned in so his face was almost pressed into her hair and he pulled back like he was a child being caught doing something naughty. There was too much embarrassed laughter to find that moment again and it had all fallen apart.

Awkward moment by awkward moment, Jem carefully wove them into every corner of his life. Every bit of time or space that could be devoted to them, was. He didn't watch movies on his laptop anymore, he watched them slouched on the second hand sofa in Will and Tessa's apartment. He dragged Will on trail runs with him when he went on Saturday mornings. He let Tessa into the grad lounges and they studied together in a corner. He edited her essays which were full of brilliant ideas and meandering grammatical choices. She read over his notes for the discussion groups in his lit class and did a good enough job fixing them that the professor had stopped by to tell him how much he had improved.

It had become his new definition of home.

* * *

"I was googling etiquette today," Will said with his head on Jem's shoulder. The first time he had done that, had sunk over while they were watching some movie, Jem had nearly forgotten how to breathe. Will had leaned in and then stopped before touching him and turned his face up.

"I don't mind," Jem had said though he wasn't entirely sure it was true. When Will was that close, Jem could smell him, could feel his hair against his throat, could not at all use his usual method of survival of pretending this wasn't actually happening. Once he'd started, Will had made it a habit. He leaned in often enough that Jem had started to find it a comforting sort of exhilarating instead of just terrifying.

"Why? Are you going to host a dinner party?" Jem asked.

"Not that kind of etiquette," Will said with a smile, "Though I think we're doing Christmas eve with my sisters, I might need to look that up too. Tess?"

"They aren't going to care if we put the dessert spoon in the wrong place so I wouldn't worry about it. Ella's going to be badgering Cecily all night about whether the new boyfriend is her match. It's going to be chaos," Tessa said. She was curled up on the other side of Will. She was a little less comfortable with the indiscriminate touching than Will was. She sat beside Jem but didn't often cuddle though he suspected that she would return it if he started it. That thought plagued him every time she was close.

"What kind of etiquette were you looking up?" Jem asked.

"Dating etiquette," Will said.

"Oh?" Jem was only half paying attention to the conversation. He had gotten distracted by the idea of Will having sisters. Tessa had mentioned a brother at one point and the idea of trying to explain this to anyone's family tugged at his imagination. He didn't like the idea of it at all.

"I don't think I've ever asked anyone out on a date," Will said.

"I guess Tessa did the asking?" Jem asked.

"Of course she did, I was awkward as hell when I was fourteen," Will said.

"You still are," Tessa said and she leaned over to ruffle his hair and kiss his forehead while he turned his face into Jem's shoulder as though he could hide from her patronizing laugh. She left them alone, the screen still showing the recommendations screen of all the things they might want to watch next.

Will sighed and lay his head back in place on Jem's shoulder, "I am, once I get my nerve up a little, going to ask you out. I thought maybe the etiquette for asking out a man was different."

Jem straightened and looked down at him but Will was ignoring him. Staring at the screen and not looking up. Jem looked down at the top of his head and his mind raced until he noticed that Will was fiddling with his watch in his hand. He was flicking the clasp open and shut and running his finger around the edge of the clock face. That Will truly was awkward as hell bled off the worst of his own anxiety. He leaned back in, slouching down so that Will was just a little closer.

"What does the internet say?" Jem asked.

"That if your match is someone of the same gender that you should not stray into a life of sin and there are other ways of exploring your connection that are good and wholesome," Will said.

Jem exploded with laughter. He curled up and leaned back into Will. The world was full of people who dedicated their lives to higher callings than their words. The famous stories of prophets with the words of God not the words of another human on their skin. The great sacrifice of those who gave up their matches to join convents and serve a higher power were loaded into religions and myths around the world and they almost all included the reminder that the saint's match had done the very same thing and they were together in whatever life came after this one.

The very small but very loud group of Christians who had decided that same sex matches were a threat to their way of life had been campaigning for years. No one listened to them. The Catholic Church had responded to the sudden explosion in the popularity of their movement by issuing edicts reaffirming that the Bible said that matches were Holy no matter the genders involved. No that it had stopped anyone from being loud and angry.

Jem laughed into Will's hair for far longer than the joke warranted but there had been a tension in the room and once it broke, he was afraid to start building it again. He let himself touch Will back. Knees together, Jem's hand on Will's shirt and Will's embarrassed laugh coming from somewhere buried against Jem's chest. He kept almost as much distance as Tessa did, rarely being the one to start anything but he ignored the voice whispering warnings in the back of his head in favour of this.

"Yes," he said.

"Yes? We need to beware the evils of sin, yes or some other sort of yes?" Will asked.

"I think the world needs more sin," Jem said with another laugh, "I would very much like to go on a date with you. Are we bringing your wife?"

"No," Will said finally pulling himself together enough to look up. Jem was used to being the nervous one. He had accepted that he would be more uncomfortable than either of them and yet here he was, looking at Will with his defenses down. Will looked unsettled and Jem touched his cheek.

There were closed doors. He had agreed to let them fold him into their little world but there wasn't some neat little a line between friends and whatever was on the other side. There was a wall. There were little holes in it where Jem could see just enough of an impossible future to feed his imagination but it was solid. He had accepted that. Now Will had cracked open the door and Jem was aware for the first time of how desperately he had been waiting for it.

"The theory here," Will said swallowing and then looking away at the door Tessa had gone through and then back at Jem before continuing, "Is that if this is going to work, it needs to work in pieces as well as all together. I don't know what the road map is and the internet was useless so I thought we could start with coffee. You like cats right?"

"Yes?" Jem said frowning at the non sequitur. What did cats have to do with anything?

"They've got this new cafe where they let you pet shelter cats and have coffee and I thought you might like that and it's downtown but not too far. We could go one evening or on a Sunday afternoon?" Will rambled at little bit and Jem smiled more broadly at him. The still formless 'this' from the other side of the wall suddenly seemed more tangible.

"Did he get the words out?" Tessa asked sticking her head back into the room.

"Barely," Jem said.

"Are you… do you," she stopped and crossed her arms to lean against the door frame. He almost always saw her with Will and that made it easy to forget that she was tall in her own right. She was back lit by the light from the kitchen and it made her look just a little bit ethereal.

"Are you asking if I said yes?" Jem asked.

"Yes, no," she sighed and came to perch on the edge of the couch beside him. He reached out a hand and she took it. Jem smiled involuntarily. Will was still there against his shoulder and he wasn't sure he would ever get over the giddiness of having both of them close enough to touch. It felt like he was getting away with something. Like they were cheating the system just a little bit.

"Do you want to be dated? I don't want you to feel like we're dragging you into things you don't want. If you want it to stay like this, we don't need to cross any lines," Tessa said.

Jem lifted her fingers and kissed them. Her expression was unreadable. She was trying so hard to be serious and he glanced at Will who was watching them with a smile. Jem flipped her hand over and pressed a kiss to her palm and then her wrist. They touched so much less than he and Will did and this sent shocks up and down Jem's spine.

"I want to cross them," he said. He might have crossed any line and every line while she looked at him like that with her mouth partly open but instead he released her hand and gave her a smile.

They didn't cross anything at the dead run that Jem's jumpy heart wanted. They inched across it. The coffee date went well. Jem didn't have a lot of experience with dating but the cafe was full of cats which helped to distract them when they hit awkward moments. They took bets on whether or not the baristas were talking about them and laughed more than anyone else in the place.

* * *

Dating Tessa was far less comfortable. They were jumpier and less able to find that place where the boundaries fell away. Tessa's humour would show up in flashes and then vanish. She couldn't hold eye contact and she touched him even less when they were alone. It was killing him by degrees and all his attempts at trying harder were just making it worse.

She sat in his car one night after a dinner date that had felt more like a bad job interview than anything meant to be enjoyable. She wore a blue dress that came very close to matching Will's eyes and her hair was pulled back in one of those messy masses of curls that girls could manage to make look elegant. She stared up at the roof of the car and Jem paused before starting the vehicle to watch her. She shut her eyes and pulled in a breath of air and held it.

"I don't know how to be attracted to someone," she said. She said it like she was talking to herself.

"You're not attracted to me?" he said and it was almost a relief to have an answer to the issue between them. It hurt but it was better than the fear that he was doing everything wrong somehow.

"That's not the problem. The problem is that I am. I am so attracted to you. I can't think of anything else when you're in the room. I was thirteen when I met Will. I hadn't even really had a first crush before him. We grew up together and I never wanted anyone else. Not even in that way that people like celebrities. I just didn't. It was either Will or nothing," she said.

Jem stared at her but she still wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were closed and her head tilted back like she was fighting a headache. He was holding onto the steering wheel too tightly but that was the only way he could keep himself from reaching for her.

"And then there's you," she said and her words came faster trying to get out before her anxiety could cut them off again, "And you're possibly the most beautiful person I've ever seen. If you ever tell Will I said that, I will kill you but you are. And you have this one smile that's different from the others. Like it's a secret that only a few people will every see and I spend far too much time trying to think of things that I could say or do that would make you smile at me like that and then when you're here, in front of me, I can't remember any of them. And you and Will make it look so easy and I don't know how to make it easy. I keep ruining it."

"Tess," he said and she turned to look at him.

"Did you know that there's biology in it?" she was still rushing words, talking to him now instead of the roof but almost babbling, "And I think that's part of our problem. You and Will touch in all those little ways that I just can't and it helps balance it out. Your body will actually align with your match's. Matching heart rates and breathing patterns. It's a pheromones thing. An instinct that we all have. Your body wants to be closer to the person you're matched with. Our instinctive brains know each other. That piece of our minds below all the rational thought and our personalities. It's the same brainwave patterns you see in parents and infants when they're bonding."

"Tess," he tried again and she finally got a handle on everything she had been saying.

"I might have read a lot of psychology books," she said.

"I didn't know most of that," Jem said.

"Look at me. I'm spouting off facts like a crazed encyclopedia. I'm sorry this is so hard," she said in a soft voice.

"Don't be, it isn't your fault," he said.

"It is, it is because all I can think about when I'm with you is kissing you," she said.

He'd leaned toward her. He had thought he could say something comforting, something to ease how anxious she was. All of those things died on his lips when she said the word kissing. He leaned in a little closer and her eyes widened. He closed the space, leaning over the gear shift and the cup holders to brace his hand on the back of her seat.

She kissed him first.

She tasted like the lemon dessert she'd had in the restaurant and for a moment it was achingly gentle. That didn't last. Her mouth opened in a gasp that was half surprise and half relief. He kissed her deeper. He had no idea how to do it well but he didn't care. He let his body lead. He didn't stop to think as his hand slid up into her hair and pushed the curls down so they fell around her face. Her skin was warm and she murmured against his mouth when he did something right.

She swung herself over the console and hiked her dress up high enough to sit in his lap. His eyes flew open and he caught her around the waist, steadying her as she tried to balance. There wasn't quite enough room but they were past caring. Jem pulled her in close and she laughed as her knee slipped off the edge of the seat. Kissing her while she was still smiling and pressed so close that he was pretty certain her biology textbooks were right and their heartbeats were falling in sync. They were both racing but they were racing at the same speed.

He tried to adjust her and she slipped again. She swore as her knee bumped against something and they were both laughing. She pressed her face into his neck and laughed like she was letting out all the weeks of awkward. He laughed with her, holding her close. She swung herself around so she was sitting on his lap with her feet tossed out over the passenger seat.

"What happened to your shoe?" he asked.

"It came off," she said, "I think it fell somewhere between the seat and the door."

She cuddled in against his shoulder and they sat like that, in the parking lot of the restaurant where anyone might notice. He wanted to take her home and see how far they could go with enough space to move but he didn't want to push her. This was enough. This was more than enough. Losing himself in Tessa like this was better than he had imagined.

"That one," she said reaching up to run her finger down his cheek.

"Hmm?" he said.

"That's the smile, the one I kept wanting to find," she said.

"I think you can pretty reliably find it if you do that again," he said.

"Noted," she said with a laugh, the kind of laugh that he had never been able to get from her, that she usually saved for Will.

Jem walked her to her door but didn't take her up on the invitation to come in. He kissed her there in the hall outside their apartment and it felt more like a first kiss than the other one had. Soft and lingering and the good kind of nervous that was all butterflies in stomachs and eyes fluttering shut. He went home still smiling and the need to put it all into music was so strong that he had to get his violin and head back to the practice hall.

* * *

And shortly after that, December was upon them. Will's sisters appeared from the woodwork, dragging away at what little time Tessa wasn't devoting to studying for exams. They still had their study time, which included far more touching than it had before but almost no time spent in one another's laps. Will was even more distracted by the two of them but had taken to using Jem as an excuse to avoid any family bonding trip he didn't want to be a part of.

"Cecily has this boyfriend now, he's filthy rich, has a father embroiled in some sort of horrendous scandal and is a bit of a douche. She dragged us all to brunch yesterday and now she's dropping hints about showing up for dinner. If she does, Tess is going to kill us all, just wipe out the family line so she can get some studying done," Will said after throwing himself down the sofa in Jem's living room.

"And you decided it was safer to be here?" Jem asked.

"Essentially, once it's all over I'll help her hide the bodies. We had that written into our wedding vows specifically but I need to survive the carnage first," Will said, "Cecily will call, I will ignore it, she will call Tessa, Tessa will tell her I am out. I will be free for another day. Tomorrow, Ella and Cecily and Jessamine and Douche-face will all come and find me and I will be forced to go Christmas shopping with them all."

Jem had pages and pages of notes and grammatical trees spread out in front of him. He was just as deep into studying for finals as Tessa was but he didn't growl when he was interrupted like she did which Will seemed to take as an invitation. As someone who was used to being alone, Jem found it both sweet and annoying and the combination usually left him too confused to tell Will to get out.

"You should come," Will said.

"Shopping with your sisters?" Jem asked.

"Yes," Will said.

"Cecily and this boyfriend you hate so much are very together. I believe you said Ella and Jessamine are engaged and you and Tessa are married, I would not fit into any of that. I would be the odd awkward, seventh wheel," he said.

"Seventh wheel isn't a thing," Will argued, "I need to start laying the ground work so when I go and introduce you to my mother and father, I have them on my side. Mom is going to find it very strange, dad isn't going to care but I still want to make sure that Cecily and Ella like you enough that they'll help make it all seem normal to them. Cece can convince anyone of anything, even our mother."

"You want to introduce me to your parents?" Jem asked.

He turned around but couldn't see more of Will than his legs hanging over the side of the couch. He got up and came to lean over the back of it. He looked down at Will who was fiddling with the case of his phone. He flipped it open and shut. Open and shut. He looked up at Jem, tilting his head back and shaking hair out of his eyes. He covered up his nervous expression with a confident smile that up to that point, Jem had assumed was as natural as breathing for him.

"Yes," Will said.

"Why? Isn't that just going to make things more complicated than they have to be?" Jem asked. He stared down at him and tried to keep the creeping smile off his face. He wanted to look serious but his lips kept tugging up at the corners.

"This isn't a passing thing. If you were the guy I was seeing on the side or if it was something we did because we just wanted to have some spicier sex, then sure, yes it wouldn't be worth the weirdness of telling my parents or yours but that isn't what this is. I want this to be something that lasts. I know we haven't figured out exactly how it works yet and it's still new and strange but this is a relationship taking its first steps not a phase we're all going to grow out of," Will said and then his expression faltered, the cocky smile letting in a flicker of vulnerability as he said, "At least it isn't for me."

Jem climbed up over the top of the couch and Will's eyes went wide. Jem settled a knee on either side of Will's waist and smiled at the memory of Tessa sitting over him the same way. Leaning over Will while he was flat on his back made Jem's thoughts race but Will's flash of doubt was gone, replaced with a very different kind of nerves. Will was still holding his phone between his hands so Jem pulled it away and tucked it into his own pocket.

"It isn't for me either," he said.

Will didn't seem to know quite what to do with his hands so Jem laced their fingers together and held them until Will's face relaxed into a smile. Jem leaned in closer and Will let his hands go in favour of holding him around the waist. The size of Will surprised him again and again. Jem was tall and he almost never felt like a small person but Will was big hands and broad shoulders and Jem wanted to flip them over just to feel all that weight pressing down over him.

He didn't. He liked the way Will looked up at him too much. He bent down until they were nose to nose. Will leaned up for a kiss and Jem pulled back. Not because he didn't want it but because the tension of the near thing made his heart pound and he wanted it to last just a little bit longer. Will slid his hand up from his waist to Jem's neck to pull him in and he sat back up.

"I should really be studying," Jem said and started to get up.

"No, no, studying is stupid, you don't want to do that, you can't leave me here alone," Will pouted and grabbed hold of his hip, pulling him down so their bodies were tight together. The realization that Will could quite literally hold him down surprised him. Some of it must have shown on his face because one glance was all it took for Will to release him. He put a flat palm just above the waistband of Jem's jeans and looked up at him instead. Not holding on but still demanding.

Jem laughed and Will gave him an exaggerated expression, puppy dog eye and his lower lip pushed out. Another hand joined the one on his stomach and slid up his chest. Jem sighed and gave up any plans of further teasing. He lay down over Will and paused for just a moment, waiting for a smile before he closed the kiss.

Will smiled and kissed back, catching Jem's face between his hands and pulling him in. There was a hurried scrabble of hands as they tried to figure each other out but it fell away to slower kisses. Will held on. He looped his arms around Jem's back and kept him close. They cuddled together and Jem let his hands wander through Will's hair. If it was styled when he had arrived, it was going to be a nest by the time he left. Silk soft and a tangle of curls that dragged on Jem's fingers as they wove through it. Will's hands wandered down his back, up his legs, across his chest.

Jem did not keep his phone in his pocket and he never had set it to vibrate so when Will's went off he jumped. Will caught him before he could fall off the couch. Will went looking for his phone, sticking his hand into Jem's pockets until he finally found the right one. He grimaced at the screen before answering it.

"Are you dying?" he asked and after a pause, "Maimed?" another pause, "In another way severely injured or in need of assistance?" another pause in which Jem snickered and then clapped a hand over his mouth, "Then I do not want to hear about it. Talk tomorrow, El!"

He hung up the phone and reached out to slide his hands back into the back pockets of Jem's jeans. He sat up to be able to do it properly which put Jem squarely in his lap. His heart was beating like it wanted to take flight and Will's face was close.

"You're phone is ringing again," Jem said.

"You have a cute butt," Will told him, ignoring he phone completely, the comment startled a laugh out of Jem and he kissed him again.

Then his phone started to ring as well. The familiar sound of the ringer pulling him back to the real world. He squirmed away from Will's hands and went to answer it. Will followed. He hugged Jem from behind as he picked up the phone. Jem didn't try to stop the smile on his face as Will set his chin on his neck. He leaned back.

"Hello Tessa," he said.

"Will's sister is very concerned that he is cheating on me for some reason," Tessa said, "So I told her that I would call his boyfriend just to be sure."

Jem's laughed bubbled over again and somehow he ended up with his phone on speaker while Will and Ella bickered. He had no siblings. He had never even really had many friends so their back and forth full of inside jokes was a strange thing to be caught in the middle of. Will played the boyfriend card harder than Jem would have expected and Ella took it all as a joke but Jem still found himself invited on the shopping trip that Will had wanted to avoid.

"Will I regret agreeing to that?" he asked.

"Probably, but let's pretend that little interlude never happened and go back to the couch and the not studying," Will said.

Shopping with the Herondales was an experience especially with Will making a show of the boyfriend thing. There was hand holding and kisses on the cheeks and a third degree from Ella about who he was. She never used the phrase "Are your intentions honourable?" but Jem kept expecting it. Ella had honey blonde hair and eyes a lighter shade of blue from her siblings. She had Tessa exchanged looks sometimes as though they understood each other better than most.

Ella's fiance was even blonder than she was and movie star pretty. She also seemed to find Ella's siblings a little bit annoying. She was warmer to Cecily than she was to Will but Will didn't seem to care. She rarely left Ella's side and the two of them had perfected a matching expression of bafflement when Will said something silly or Cecily did something unladylike.

Tessa gave Jem the highlights of Jessamine's story when they had a quiet moment, left alone to guard the bags while everyone else was off buying food at the food court. An orphan with a trust fund bigger than the GDP of some countries that she was still two years away from being able to access. She and Ella were a match who had met while Ella was volunteering with an agency that specialized in supporting foster kids. Jessamine did not appreciate anyone knowing she had been a foster kid and Jem was sworn to secrecy.

Cecily was still officially unmatched and would not say whether or not she and the tall green eyed man she had brought along were a match or not. Jessamine and Ella dropped hints, tried to get the answer out of Gabriel himself, tried to get the answer out of Cecily by cornering her while the boys were in another store. Tessa thought the entire production was hilarious. Cecily seemed to agree. Gabriel looked like he was going to pass out from embarrassment half the time.

"You know, they live so much in each other, it's nice that they have you," Cecily said to Jem outside a housewares shop.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Will and Tess, all their friends are those casual sort of friends of proximity. Classmates or co-workers. They don't usually let people into the little world that they have but they both really like you. It's a good thing. So welcome to the family, Boyfriend," she said with a laugh before leaving him to stand alone while she went to argue with her siblings about whether their mother would ever use a crystal cut punch bowl.

* * *

Shopping with the Herondales happened right as exams finished. Three days later, he took Tessa out on a date to celebrate the completion of the semester during which she attempted to teach him to ice-skate. It took him an embarrassingly long time to figure it out but eventually, he was able to stay up with a hand on her arm for support instead of a death grip to keep from falling. She claimed she wasn't much of a skater but she looked graceful to him. Her scarf trailed when she skated away from him and then turned to come back to her place at his side.

He took her back to his apartment after they'd drank enough hot chocolate to thaw their fingers and toes. She still had a half cup in her hand as the came up the street from the bus stop. Jem didn't notice the car in the visitor's parking, he was too busy watching her. He pushed the door to his apartment open to find it bright and full of the smells of cooking food.

"Jian!" his mother said, sticking her head out of his kitchen. She had a spoon in one hand and a big smile. He had given them a spare key in case of emergencies. They had never used it. They hadn't come to visit him since the week he had moved in. They hadn't called. They hadn't hinted. They'd just shown up.

"Hello Mama," he said as she threw her arms around him.

She looked like she was about to launch into one of her long rambling stories when she caught sight of Tessa. Tessa stood behind Jem, her hat and scarf still wrapped around her, looking uncomfortable with the tiny explosive stranger in front of her. Jem had a moment to look at his mother from someone else's point of view. Wen Yu was pushy and forceful, tiny and beautiful, loud and with a tendency to hop through languages during a conversation. She wore a black dress and had her hair up, they'd probably had some sort of event that day. Jem could see her blazer and her heels left abandoned in his kitchen.

"Mama, this is Tessa, Tessa, this is my mother, Wen Yu," Jem said. She shook hands and his mother gave him a pointed, wide eyed look that made Jem uncomfortable. He silently pleaded that she would wait until Tessa had gone home before starting the same interrogation that Ella and Will had been giving Cecily for weeks.

Jem's father looked even more surprised to see Tessa and Jem realized he had never brought a date home, had never once even mentioned anyone by name to them. His attempts at romance had always fallen flat before they'd gotten serious enough to warrant having to tell his parents. Jonah Carstairs was tall and narrow though not as thin as Jem was and he was blonde. He had taken off his tie and his jacket but still wore a pressed dress shirt and his hair was impeccable. The two of them didn't fit in Jem's apartment.

Wen Yu watched Tessa and Tessa seemed to have lost all that bubbling humour. She was quiet and nervous. Very polite but not at all like herself. Jem stayed near her, keeping his knee against hers while his parents asked all those generic questions about majors and career goals and where she was from that people liked to ask. His mother served them some kind of noodles but Jem didn't pay much attention to what it was or what it tasted like.

"And what are your parents like?" his father asked Tessa.

"I don't remember, they died when I was three, car crash. I was taken in by my Aunt. My cousin Nate and I grew up like brother and sister," Tessa said and Jem looked over at her. He hadn't known that. The one story she had told about Nate, the one of her meeting with Will, she had simply called him her brother.

"We should have your Aunt and brother over while we're here, make it a little family get-together," Jonah said and Jem gave him a look. He ignored it. Jem knew why they were latching on to her, they thought she was his match. They were trying to make her feel welcome but for politicians they were doing a surprisingly bad job of reading her. She listened to their stories and smiled along but every time they started asking questions about her, she got uncomfortable.

"My Aunt is dead and my brother is," Tessa paused, the tension building in her shoulders. She didn't look at anyone when she said, "Not available, I should probably get home. It was lovely to meet you both."

Then she was away from the table, leaving her half eaten plate and grabbing her boots and coat without putting anything on. She disappeared out into the hall and for a moment Jem stared after her.

"Maybe, the next time, you should call before you just show up," Jem said to his confused looking parents before he went after Tessa. She wasn't in the hall. He found her standing outside fumbling with the zipper on her jacket. He lined it up for her and zipped it up without a word. She met his eyes but didn't say anything.

"I'll take you home, we're taking their car," he said holding up the keys. He'd grabbed them by accident but she was too upset to zip up her jacket so he wasn't going to leave her alone while he went to get the other ones.

She didn't argue, letting him push her into the very expensive car his parents had rented or gotten from an embassy or bought or however his parents acquired their cars. If they needed to leave, they could use his even if it didn't have heated leather seats. He was angry and defensive but he didn't know why or what had upset Tessa so much. She stared out the window. Silent. Perfectly silent as he drove her through the city.

He walked her up to her door and she stopped with her hand on the knob and turned to look a him. Her expression was serious and sad. He didn't touch her. He wasn't sure if it would be acceptable or not.

"You're parents are nice," she said.

"I would have said pushy," he said.

"No, they were very nice, I'm sorry for getting so upset. It's just a bad topic. I should have said something, I just didn't know what to say," she said.

"You don't need to explain it to me," he said.

That seemed to decide her. She opened the door and took his hand to pull him inside. The apartment was empty but felt more like home than his own ever did. He followed her as she went to put on a kettle and make a pot of tea. She didn't speak as she did it. She didn't say a word until they were seated on the sofa with tea cups in hand. For a moment, she sat beside him. Then she leaned her head against his shoulder and put her knees over his lap. He pulled her in close and waited while she drank most of her cup of tea.

"It's not a nice story," she said.

"I'll still listen," he said.

"My brother is a selfish person and he isn't very good about thinking things through. He is the type of person who falls for get rich quick schemes and expects to be able to charm his way out of any trouble. He dealt drugs and went into debt with bookies over illegal card games. He took acting jobs for the exposure and kept saying he was going to move to LA to get discovered. That kind of thing. Then he'd show up all big bright smiles and expect that to just sweep it all away. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't but it worked often enough that he expected it," she said.

He couldn't see her face, she was looking down at her nearly empty tea cup and her hair hid everything from view. He put his cup on the side table and stroked her hair as she talked.

"My aunt always believed that he could do no wrong. Even as he came home drunk out of his head and put his foot through the tv she had saved up for months to afford. Even as he stole her jewelry to pawn it for cash. Even as he got suspended and spent summers at camps for reforming delinquents, she still thought he'd come out alright. Maybe he could have if he hadn't fallen in with the Pandemonium Club. They fancy that they're better than a gang but they're not, not really," Tessa said and she took a deep breath.

"One day, they came after Nate, he was behind on his debt and they found him at home. There was a fight and there were guns and Harriet got shot. I pulled her into the kitchen as everyone else, even Nate, ran. She was his mother and he ran instead of staying to help. She was gone before the ambulance got there. The bullet had punctured a lung. It's not really dinner conversation," she said.

"When did it happen?" he asked.

"Senior year, just before I graduated. Will's family were all I had at graduation. We got married three weeks later. Nate as already in custody by the time my exams began. He was sent to jail that summer. At least it was a fast trial. He's got another three years. They got him on drug charges. No one's been charged with the murder," she said.

Tessa fell silent again. Jem didn't say anything. He couldn't think of what to say. She didn't ask him for anything. She just curled against him and closed her eyes. He ignored the fact that he had stolen his mother's expensive car and stayed with her. He laid her down on the sofa and held her close until she fell asleep. Her deep even breathing lulled him as well and he dozed off with her curled on his chest.

* * *

Will woke him later. He wasn't sure how long he had been asleep but his arm was numb from Tessa's weight on it. He felt warm and heavy. It could have been one of those perfect moments but Will's expression threw him off. Will was wasn't quite frowning. On someone else, the expression might have looked neutral but Jem couldn't remember Will ever looking at him like that.

He held out his free hand and Will took it but the expression didn't change. Will squeezed and his hands were still cold from being outside. Jem wasn't awake enough yet to ask the questions that were building up in his head so he just pulled Will's hand in and pressed a kiss to his fingers.

"Is everything alright?" Will asked in a whisper.

"My parents ambushed us tonight, they tried to be nice and just ended up being overbearing and bringing up all the wrong things. She told me what happened to her aunt," he said.

Will nodded but his expression didn't relax. Jem struggled out from Tessa's hold and laid her back down on the cushions. She didn't wake. He looked down at her for a long moment before grabbing hold of Will's hand to pull himself to his feet. Will gave him a little smile but his attention was on Tessa. Jem was fully awake now and could feel the force of Will's discomfort though he didn't understand it.

"I'll go," Jem said leaning in to press a kiss to Will's cheek. It drew Will's attention back to him. His eyes were dark, his brows drawn together in confusion or maybe anger or something else entirely.

"No," Will said, "You don't have to."

"Then tell me what's wrong," Jem said.

"Nothing," Will said.

"Liar," Jem said.

Will responded by pulling him away from Tessa and into the hall where he backed him up against a wall. For a moment Jem was sure that Will was going to scream or even hit him but instead he just leaned in and rested his head against Jem's shoulder. Jem startled then looped his arms around Will's shoulders and held onto him. His nose was cold and his hair just a little damp where snow had melted into it. He smelled like nighttime and winter and Jem cuddled in closer.

"Tell me," Jem whispered.

"I'm a selfish idiot," Will said.

"Possibly true but I still don't understand what you are so upset about," Jem said.

"She loves you. That she liked you, that she enjoys spending time with you, that you can make her smile..." Will fell silent and Jem said nothing though his heart beat picked up speed. He pulled Will in a little closer and tried not to be terrified of what he was going to say next.

"Will?" he finally forced out when Will had been silent longer than his heart could take.

"I love that about you. I love that you and Tess are what you are as much as I love this thing that we have but I hadn't realized that she loved you that much, like that. That kind of trust isn't easy for her. She doesn't sleep on people and she doesn't tell that story. People treat her differently when she does. Like she's just another statistic or some sad story to be pitied," he said.

"And you think I would do that?" Jem asked.

"No," Will said and Jem wanted to strangle him as the silence stretched again but this time he didn't need to prompt, "You are a better choice than I am. In everything. You're smarter than I am, you're going to have a better career than I ever will, you are more patient, kinder. You're better than just about anyone. I had never once, since the day we first sat out on the bleachers behind the school and didn't look at each other while we talked, I never once considered that I could lose her."

Jem didn't have an answer for that but Will wasn't looking for one. Not yet. He was still talking.

"That's the beauty of the whole match thing. You find your person and you know that they are yours for life. I am a selfish bastard and I like that. My match. My Tessa. And I like having you too. My Jem," Will lifted his head and they were nose to nose. Will was intense. Not sad, not angry, just vibrantly intense.

"You're afraid that we'll run off together and leave you behind?" Jem asked.

Will looked up at the ceiling and then back at him as though he'd lost all his words. The apartment was half lit, a light somewhere in the living room was all the illumination they had here and Will's face was cast in shadows. Jem reached up and cupped his neck then slid his hands up to his cheeks while Will stared at him in the dark.

"I love you," Jem said. "You're the one who keeps saying it can work. Would you run away with me? If I asked, would you?"

Will stared at him, pulling back so his face was caught in the light and Jem could see the force of the expression on his face. He started to say something and Jem gently put a hand over his mouth and shook his head.

"I'm not asking. I already know the answer. You wouldn't leave her behind for anything. And neither would I. You were my childhood crush, my great what-if and even for you I wouldn't give her up. Will?" Jem asked and waited until Will's attention was back on him before continuing, "I would not give you up either. Do you honestly think that she would?"

"No," Will said and his voice was soft, barely there.

Jem leaned his forehead against Will's and Tessa found them there a few minutes later. She leaned her shoulder against the wall beside Jem and reached out to play with Will's hair. Will pulled back and grabbed hold of her. He pulled her in and Jem untangled himself from Will so he could wrap an arm around her shoulder and resettle with his head leaned into both of them.

"I didn't hear you come in," Tessa said.

"I hear ambassadors were accosting you tonight, it sounds tiring," Will said with a small smile.

"It was," she said. Will kissed her. And Jem could see the emotion in it and though Tessa hadn't heard the conversation, she pulled back and looked at him like she understood it.

"I love you," she said before she kissed him back.

When they broke apart, Tessa leaned up and kissed Jem's jaw. Jem darted his attention up to Will but Will was watching her that intensity but it didn't have any of that fear in it. This look sent Jem's heart rate back into overdrive but it wasn't for the same reasons. He tightened his hold where his arm was looped around Will's waist. Once they were all pressed together he tilted Tessa's face up and kissed her.

Will let out a little laugh and Jem felt Tessa smile in answer to it though she didn't pull away from his mouth. Calm settled down over Jem. His head was spinning as someone grabbed hold of his shirt and Will leaned in to kiss a line down the side of Tessa's neck. But he was calm. There was no where else he wanted to be.

"Stay?" Tessa asked him and he pulled back and met her eyes. He was wrapped up in them and had forgotten everything outside of their little circle.

"I stole my mother's car," he said.

"You stole a car?" Will asked laughing and nuzzling the side of his head.

"I need to take it back," Jem said but he pulled Will's face around and kissed him rather than leaving. Will was still laughing at the idea of him committing car theft and kissing him while he laughed was different from kissing him any other time. He lingered but the memory of his parents had pushed in and he needed to go back and apologize and find an answer to all the questions they were going to ask about Tessa.

"I need to leave," he said finally. There were fingers in his hair and he'd slipped a hand up under the hem of Tessa's shirt and was absently stroking the skin at the small of her back to the same rhythm. He did not want to leave.

"You'll come back tomorrow?" Will asked.

"I probably owe them lunch after running out in the middle of dinner tonight but I'll be here after," Jem said.

Will pouted like a petulant child and Jem kissed him again then he pulled away, trying to untangle himself without actually letting go. It was nearly midnight and he wanted for once to not be the responsible son.

"Fine, I'll see you after work then," Will said and grinned at how much that sounded like something a suburban housewife might say.

Once he was finally outside the winter air hit him like a slap. He had borrowed Will's coat because he hadn't worn one when he'd chased Tessa out of his apartment. The night sky above was crystal clear and he stood outside their building and stared at the stars for a moment and waited for his head to clear before he tried to drive.

* * *

"What happened! Are you alright? Did you get into an accident? Is she alright? Are you alright?" was how Jem's mother welcomed him home. They were both still up and they were still in the same clothes, which meant he had stolen their suitcases along with their car. He apologized. He made them tea. He tried to explain why Tessa had been upset without giving away any of her secrets.

"Is it her?" his father finally asked. It was close to two in the morning and Jem was tired but he so rarely got to talk to his parents that he didn't complain. He hadn't talked about Tessa and Will to anyone except in vague terms to his classmates where he usually used the word 'friends' which never felt quite right for what they were.

"It's complicated," Jem said.

His mother came to sit beside him but kept quiet. She flung words around like no one else except maybe Will but she knew when to fall silent and let someone else talk.

"More complicated than being a foreign national from an unfriendly nation?" his father asked.

"China is not an unfriendly nation, Joe!" Wen said, "We are close trading partners and allies."

Jonah smiled at Jem and winked. There were some arguments that were so practiced they had ceased to even be debates and this was one of them. He had brought it up to break the tension that had been building. Jem took a moment while they talked past him about political alliances to be thankful that these were his parents. They weren't like most people's parents. They were more like long distance friends who felt a little too comfortable scolding him for not eating enough.

"Not that kind of complicated," Jem finally said interrupting them.

"What kind of complicated? Is she a cult member?" Wen asked giggling.

"No, she's married," Jem said and turned to his mother and waited for her to react. She sat up and made him repeat it. Her expression went from curious and entertained to angry in an instant.

"Jian Ming," she said.

Jem looked at her. She had a stern look on her face. He was about to get a lecture on integrity and cheating and probably the sanctity of marriage. She crossed her arms tightly and Jem wasn't sure she had ever looked at him with that kind of disappointment or anger on her face. He cut her off before she could start putting that look into words. He was going to lose all his nerve if she started to yell at him. Being yelled at by his mother had only happened three times in his entire life and he wasn't sure he could handle it on this topic.

"She's married to a man named William Herondale. Will went to Briar Pines. Remember the boy with the blue eyes? The one who read my words? Him. I had a pile of poetry in front of me when she said it, she was arguing with a friend and wanted my opinion. He's her match too," he said in a rush. Just saying it out loud was like letting a weight go. His mother's burgeoning anger was headed off by confusion.

The questions lasted almost until dawn but talking it out, defending it, explaining it, talking about it destroyed any last doubts. His mother pulled out her phone and started looking for neat answers in search engines just as he had the night after the meeting in the cafe. His father asked questions. Not questions about the words but about them. Questions about what they did and what they were like. The kind of questions you might ask about someone's new girlfriend or boyfriend in a normal conversation.

"It's not how these things are meant to work," his mother said when they were finally leaving. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him down so he was eye to eye with her. She studied him, "But you are happier than you have been in years. I want to meet him as well before we go get on another cursed plane back to the next UN Summit."

"I'll let them know that," he said.

Left alone in his apartment. Jem wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the door. He was exhausted. He had been up all night and the emotional whiplash was dragging on him as much as the physical exhaustion.

He started to laugh.

He was still laughing as he collapsed onto bed. In spite of it being four in the morning and knowing that Will had to work in the morning, he sent him a text message.

my mother wants to meet you

There was no response but it didn't damper his giddiness. He fell asleep still fully clothed and smiling.

* * *

Jem woke up almost as giddy as he had been going to sleep. He lay on his back and smiled at the ceiling for a long time before getting up. It was two in the afternoon but he took time to make himself coffee and take a long shower before he picked up the phone to see what Will had sent him.

Your mother made Tessa cry. I fear her

Jem smiled at that and sent him a few responses but didn't get an answer. He was still at work, then. Jem sent messages to Tessa instead and got responses back. She was at home and wanted to know the details of how the conversation had gone with his parents. He never phoned anyone but he phoned her and the sound of her voice brought back that settled calm from the night before. He had made his choices and he was content with that.

He didn't hang up until he went out to the car to drive back there. She met him at the door and her hair was down. He reached out and brushed it back behind her shoulder without touching her skin. Her expression softened. She pulled him into a hug. He stepped into the apartment, walking her backwards so he could shut the door before he returned it properly. She was tall enough to set her chin on his shoulder and he leaned his cheek against her hair.

"I have every intention of seducing you," she whispered in his ear and he inhaled hard.

"Tessa," he started but she reached up and put her fingers against his lips. She was cuddled into his chest, her head down against his shoulder and her body tight to his. He still had his arms around her and tightened them. That calm was still there. He'd let his doubts go but that idea still sent his heart into overdrive.

"There are three choices here," she said and waited for him to nod before continuing, "The first one is that you say no and I back off and we can find something on Netflix and have some spaghetti and everyone goes home like they always do," her fingers were still on his mouth so he didn't say anything, "The second choice is that you and I go back to the bedroom and you finally show me exactly where your words are. The third is we wait for Will to get home before we go back to the bedroom."

She dropped her fingers back to his chest and pulled back enough to look at him. Her face was carefully neutral.

"How mad will he be if I take option two?" Jem asked.

"I think a better word would be disappointed but it wouldn't be an option if he wasn't ok with it. He was in a very strange mood after whatever conversation you had last night but he wouldn't have mentioned it if he didn't mean it," she said, "I think he'd be more disappointed if you took option one."

"You two have talked this through," he said.

"We talk everything through. We're wordy people," she said with her hand on his chest and one side of mouth quirked up in a smile.

"Have you ever attempted to seduce a stranger before?" Jem asked.

"You're not a stranger and no, stranger or not, I've never invited anyone else to bed," she said. "Before you, I had never even kissed anyone but him. This isn't a thing we do. This offer doesn't go out to anyone who isn't you and only you but you know that, don't you?"

"Yes," Jem smiled and leaned down so his forehead touched hers. He just held her and drifted in that nearness. Then he kissed her cheek. She giggled and he kissed a slow trail out to just below her ear as she tilted her head back for him. He was out of his depth, lost at sea and she was the only anchor he had left. He stopped with his mouth right against her ear.

He wasn't completely sure of his decision until he said it.

"Wait for Will," he said.

She was biting her lip when he looked back at her and her nerves eased something in him. He wasn't the only one out of his depth and that made him feel immeasurably better. He laughed and kissed her forehead. She kept smiling as he dropped kisses everywhere but her mouth. Her cheeks and temples, her hair and her neck, her chin and the end of her nose then he settled back with his forehead against hers and one hand curled around her neck to keep her close.

"I need to send him a message," she said.

The message was a selfie that Jem took because his arms were longer. He took a bunch and they sent Will three. One with her laughing at the last attempt with her face down against Jem's neck. One where they had managed to both look at the phone at the same time and Tessa's favourite where she was watching the camera but Jem was staring at her, saying something.

Will responded back with, a woman on the bus saw these over my shoulder and told me how cute you are, i think i'm going to tell her the truth

dare you Jem sent back. He was over confident and overwhelmed. In the time between sending the first picture and receiving the answer, Jem had backed Tessa into the living room and she had pulled him down with her onto the couch. He sent another picture that even though they were still both fully clothed and hadn't kissed yet, wasn't anything to be sharing with strangers on the bus. Tessa had her head tilted back and her mouth half open. Jem's could taste the skin on her throat when he smiled at the camera.

holy fuck. you cannot send me things like that when i am in public. holy fuck Will sent back. He didn't respond to the next two messages and Jem abandoned the phone face down on the table to turn all his attention back to Tessa.

Cuddled close while they were dancing in the kitchen was one thing but flat on her back and smiling was another. He arranged himself so he lay on top of her and their combined weight pushed her back into the sofa cushions. Her hair spread around her and her eyes were more blue than usual in the half light of the room. She kept one arm crooked around his neck and the other traced his cheek bones and his lips and wandered up into his hair.

The kiss meant more than a kiss should have been able to and Jem wanted to stretch out this moment before it happened. He also wanted to fling himself headlong into anything and everything that came next but he could feel every breath she took and wanted to make it last. When he did tilt her chin up, he did it slowly and held her eyes for a long moment before he closed the kiss. Soft, just a whisper of touch. She kissed him back just as carefully.

It was like being drawn out by the tide. They move together slowly and tentatively and then deeper and smoother as the nerves fled. She fit against him like she had been designed to spend her life in his arms. His hands wandered but never slipped below clothing. She arched her back to press her breast up into his hand and gasped when he squeezed.

Will found them like that. Flushed and pressed together. For a moment neither of them noticed him. He slipped into the apartment and shut the door behind him almost silently. He leaned against the door frame between the hallway and the living room and just watched. Tessa noticed him first and broke away from the kiss to reach out a hand for him. Jem turned in time to see the smile on his face spread as he came across the room to sit down on the edge of the coffee table beside them.

Tessa's smile was lazy and her lips flushed and pink. Will smiled at her and let out a breath as he reached out to touch the side of her face. If Jem had been thinking he might have let her up but he didn't so Will just leaned in past him and kissed her. He did it hard. Possessive and needy. Jem ran his fingers through Will's hair like Tessa had been doing to him, cradling the back of his neck and weaving through the strands. Will broke away from her and turned to look at him. Jem leaned almost all the way into the kiss before he realized what he was doing and slowed.

"I thought I could survive this but I think it's going to kill me," Will said and the last bit of the sentence was lost in Jem's mouth. He kissed as hard as he had done to Tessa and Jem pressed back into it.

"Should I be worried, do we need to call an ambulance?" Jem asked without pulling away too far way.

"Too late, I think I've been dead since I opened that nearly pornographic picture you sent me. I hate you both so much," Will said and Tessa laughed. He looked down at her, still pinned below Jem and asked, "What have I missed?"

"Just this," she said.

"You're coming to bed?" Will asked Jem. They were close together, Jem was still holding Will by the back of the neck. Tessa twisted her hips below him and he gasped. Will kissed him again and then pulled back and waited for the answer.

"Never have," he muttered.

"Gone to bed with two people? Neither has anyone else here," Will said.

"Gone to bed with anyone," Jem admitted. His eyes were shut and his face was very close to Will's as he spoke.

Tessa's hands were on his waist and they tightened just a little bit. He remembered what Will had said about her feeling like she needed to protect him and he looked back down to see her expression soft and focused. He wanted to tell her he didn't need it but he also wanted her to look at him like that for the rest of his life.

"Are you sure you don't want to start somewhere a little more... normal?" Will asked.

"I want to start right here," Jem said leaning in a little harder. He rubbed his cheek along Will's and the very faint stubble there made him shiver and he pushed the sensation down, pressing Tessa harder into the cushions below them.

The little noise she made nearly undid him.

She pushed on his chest and it took him an embarrassingly long time to realize she wanted let up. Once they were sitting, she leaned her head against his chest and reached out to grab Will's hand and lace their fingers together. She was rumpled and it made her even more enticing that she usually was. Her jeans had slid down just a little and her shirt was skewed so he could see her collarbone. Will watched her with an expression to match the feeling running through Jem.

"Lines?" she asked. The question was obviously directed at Jem but he didn't quite understand what it meant. She tried again, "Tell me what you like, what you don't, how far you're willing to go. What do you want?"

"Is you too vague an answer?" Jem asked.

"Tell me your dirty fantasies," Will said and it was only halfway a joke.

"What if I wanted you to wear a maid's outfit and spank me with a duster?" Jem asked and Will started to laugh. It was what he needed to hear. He couldn't breathe when this felt big and momentous. He needed it to be just another thing they did together. If he thought about it too hard, he froze up. But with Will laughing, it was just them.

"I would look good in one of those little skirts but I don't think I have enough cleavage to do the uniform justice," Will said and then laughter shifted and he said, "I'll spank you if you want me to."

"Maybe not today," Jem said with a laugh of his own that came out like a giggle. He started to bite it back but Tessa was laughing too.

They were both close and they were touching each other as well as him. The world was gone. Every other concern had evaporated. They fell into bed in a mass of warm skin and laughter and soft hands.

He woke up later that evening to find the room lit by the lamp on the bedside table. Tessa was still in his arms and was tracing patterns on his arms. Will was behind him, no longer holding on but still close enough that Jem could feel the warmth of him. He and Tessa were talking over him.

"What are you talking about?" he muttered.

"Your parents and mine. We're trying to decide if mine will take this news as well as yours did," Will said.

Jem rolled over onto his back to look up at him and said, "I don't want to worry about that right now."

"What do you want to worry about?" Will asked.

Jem reached up and pulled him back down for a kiss and let that be enough of an answer. They stayed in bed most of the rest of the night and Jem fell asleep between them and woke up to discover that Will hogged the shower and Tessa didn't talk much until she had had a cup of coffee. He kept smiling every time he made eye contact with either of them. It was a perfect morning.

* * *

Jem's parents had planned to stay until Christmas but they'd been gone on the twenty third to respond to some emergency and rather than spending Christmas morning alone, he woke up with Tessa's arm across his stomach to find that Will had made breakfast. They passed the rest of the winter wrapped up in each other. They settled into a routine of work and school and shared apartments.

As the world started to warm, as exams came around again and the flowers started blooming, Jem found himself looking at the future. He had always had plans of going abroad. He had another year in his program but after that he had been planning to leave the country. He had sat down with his adviser in the last years of his undergraduate degree and had made a plan. A plan for the next ten years that could have landed him at the UN or working for an embassy and it no longer looked like such an important thing.

"I want a home," he said during a phone call to his mother and it had all clicked into place. He had planned for their life and now he found that he didn't want it. He sat down with Tessa and they went through job listings for things for linguistics and translation majors to do with their lives that didn't involve international governments.

On the day of Tessa's graduation, Jem let Will introduce him to Cecily and Ella with a full explanation. Which had led to the rather terrifying experience of being hugged by both sisters who made his mother look laid back and placid. Once the overbearing sisters and all of Tessa's friends had finally filtered away and they were left on the green outside the Convocation Hall, he grabbed their hands and pulled them away.

The hallways were empty, everyone headed off to dinner with their families. Tessa still wore her gown though her cap was gone. Will was carrying her diploma and her bag for her. Jem led them up through the English building until they reached the rooftop. It was an old building and the teaching assistants knew all its secrets. He found the key right where they had told him it would be and pushed the door open to a roof.

"Wow," Tessa said stepping up toward the edge where an old iron rail was rusting between them and the five story drop to the cobblestone courtyard below. They weren't high enough to see everything but it was a good view. Will leaned against Jem's shoulder and smiled but he wasn't really looking out at the city, he was looking at Tessa.

"I got you something," Jem said and Tessa came back to stand with them. He held out a flat velvet box. Will raised his eyebrows and Tessa ran a hand over it.

"I have never been prouder to know anyone than the two of you. I love you and I would promise you the world if I could. I can't but I can promise you my heart. As long as you will have me, I am yours," he said.

He passed the box to Tessa and let her open it. He knew what was inside because he had had them specially made. Three simple silver rings with a three strand braid decorating the outside. Tessa passed one to Will and then gave the last one to Jem. They laced their fingers together and leaned against the rail and looked down at the rest of the world.

On the inside of the band, where it would be hidden away against skin were three words written in Chinese characters.

Dust. Shadows. Poets.

Jem squeezed their hands as they stood in their little circle and knew that he had found his happily ever after. It wasn't like his parents' or like anyone else he had ever met but it was everything he wanted.


End file.
